I play Elemental like I play Gal Civ 2, slow. Epic seems to need a tuning and tweaking. It takes very little time to reach a five turn breakthrough pace and get to the end game. Part of the problem is that I have so many research buildings that I can build in every city, with no opportunity cost making me limit the number of schools or abbeys. Once I have schools in four cities I don't even need to think about a teching strategy.

You guys know best how to fix tech pacing so I will use your previous techniques as suggestions:

-Increasing the progressive cost of techs in an epic game. I don't want to get technical but level 20 should be where your exponential equation begins to really accelerate. This will allow opportunity cost to be a factor in research and make the random availability of techs really put a knot in someone's beehive farming strategy. The drawback here is that teching as a strategy becomes useless past about level 26 in every field. If you have a solution, please post.

-Making the school less powerful and the abbey a little more powerful. This, combined with some percentage scaling abilities for the one space research buildings, could make teching a more viable strategy while seperating it from people who just want to spend an average amount of space on a middle-ground reseach priority.

-Having the Univeristy work as the Temple of Neutrality would be an interesting way to approach things. In an epic game it is too easy to get all the research buildings. Adding some of them as an exclusive thing that must be chosen over other kinds of important buildings or abilites would set epic teching strategies apart from a military or diplomacy strategy that would be more favorable on this kind of setting; we know that spearman spam will be common in epic games.

Essentially my point is that Epic should be a higher exponetial scale than the other paces of gameplay. A teching strategy should have to implemented intentionally by the player or computer to achieve the highest levels of advancement. This would allow for more differences in city and military design and increse the flavor of all other aspects of an epic game. As it stands in Beta 2A, Epic seems to be failing.